


Some Sunny Day

by Ilyone, themastersbeard



Series: This is the Army [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Baseball, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pop Culture, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Recovery, Socialism, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Trauma, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-10
Updated: 2017-06-10
Packaged: 2018-11-12 12:53:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11162250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilyone/pseuds/Ilyone, https://archiveofourown.org/users/themastersbeard/pseuds/themastersbeard
Summary: At six he goes jogging, at eight-thirty he puts on the percolator to boil while he takes a shower, at nine he—Or, a recovery in two parts.





	Some Sunny Day

**Author's Note:**

> Huge huge huge thanks to the wonderful Ilyone who drew the beautiful art that inspired and accompany the fic. At one point I asked for a human-shaped blob, and instead got a masterpiece. I'm in awe of your talent, and so eternally grateful that I got to work with someone as wonderful as you.
> 
> A further huge thanks to everyone who beta-read this, and put up with me playing twenty questions about every scene. A special thanks to Layla, who nitpicked every sentence to bits, helped with all the ~cool~ dialogue, and who was an endless source of help and inspiration. What I would do without you, I haven't the faintest. 
> 
> Please click-through the links if you're able to! Some of the songs are for ~ambience~, but others are central to the scenes they're included in (it should be clear which is which!)
> 
>  **A note for Slavic language-speakers:** There's a scene with a line of dialogue that's written in Cyrillic. It's in Macedonian/Bulgarian-- not in Russian. A Russian-reader commented to let me know that it means something VERY different in Russian versus Macedonian or Bulgarian. So a heads up that живот means 'life' in Macedonian, not 'stomach'! (Thank you so much to secretlytodream for pointing this out!) 
> 
> If you squint and turn your head, there's a Joey Bats cameo.

They give him an apartment in D.C. He lives in it alone, but it’s larger than the one he had shared with his mother as a child. It’s more than twice the size. It doesn’t have his childhood things in it, those are in the mock-up of his childhood bedroom in the Smithsonian.

People give him gifts, posters of motorcycles and War propaganda. Someone shows him how to use an electric leveller, how to drill holes along the clean laser projected line so that his frames are of the same height. The frames never go up.

It turns out, a long while after, that it didn’t matter so much.

“I was planning ahead—” he jokes to Natasha. “—less packing.”

She doesn’t smile.

What she does do is bring him renter’s and buyer’s guides from Brooklyn, magazines with black and white pages that list houses and apartments in sparse detail. They remind him of the classifieds in newspapers that stained his fingers growing up: One bedroom, one bath, nice view.

She turns up again, Clint in tow, a week later to help him pack his things. It’s the first time he’s had to make a substantive decision in years. Army command, and SHIELD had provided everything and left little room for direction.

“Clint lives in Brooklyn,” Natasha tells him from behind the flap of a cardboard box.

Clint, looking a bit caught out and holding a pair of underwear in either hand— collected from where Steve had kicked them into the corner over the course of the week— takes a moment to respond: “Yeah, yeah— uh, yes, I do.” He quickly drops the offending garments.

“Where?”

“Bed-Stuy,” Clint scrapes a hand through the scruff of his hair.

“Heh,” is all Steve says in reply.

He pretends not to see Natasha smile.

—

The apartment Steve chooses in Brooklyn has one bedroom, one bath, a mash of kitchen and living space, and a rusting fire escape. It’s bigger than his childhood apartment, but not by much. It’s not in Bed-Stuy. 

There are no vantage points into his apartment, he made sure to choose the tallest building in the area.

He doesn’t put up the pictures, but this time he just leaves them boxed in the storage cupboard out of sight.

Being back in Brooklyn is— is—

  
—

On Thursdays he visits Peggy, and then goes to lunch with Sam.  

Sometimes when he gets home the water pitcher is empty, and there are granola wrappers in the garbage.

Huh.

He tries not to hope.

—  
 

He’d had frequent nightmares as a child, especially when feverish and ill. They were of mundane things made hellish by the fog of childhood. After, he’d always dreamed of the War. 

When he was nine, he’d caught strep, and on its heels had followed the rheumatic fever that left his joints swollen, and limbs rash-ridden. It’s strange then that he dreams of it now, when it had receded into the recesses of hazy memory.

Bucky had come to visit almost every day, had sat in the doorway— if Steve’s mother was home— or on the foot of Steve’s bed— if she wasn’t. In the dream he reads pages out of the Brooklyn Eagle on the Manhatten Incident and laughs as if it were a joke.

Steve awakes more from the smothering sense of loss than fear. It hadn’t been the _Eagle_ , he thinks, wildly, still half-drowsy with sleep. It was Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, anything with spacemen; Bucky’d been nuts about them.

Steve had always thought of himself as an ancillary figure in the narrative of Bucky Barnes’ life.

When they had met, there had already been a host of characters that Steve didn’t have himself: a mother and father, Becca, Roy, and baby Charlie, grandparents, and cousins, aunts and uncles and innumerable friends. Steve had shadowed Bucky’s success through baseball leagues, to valedictorian and captain of the school’s boxing team.

When ill, Bucky represented to him the whole of the outside word, with its endless possibilities and dusty Brooklyn Heights air.

He can’t get back to sleep now, so he sits at the window and sketches the unfamiliar lines of the once-familiar city.

At six he goes jogging, at eight-thirty he puts on the percolator to boil while he takes a shower, at nine he—

—

In the muddled months after the ice, Howard’s son took it upon himself to send Steve clip upon clip from films detailing the life of Captain America that had occupied Hollywood for much of the twentieth century. 

 _Dear Tony,_ he had replied.

 _I really appreciate that you’re trying to get me up to date on all the cinema I’ve missed, but I was always more of a Clark Gable fella._ _  
_ _  
_ _Yours Sincerely S.G. Rogers_

Peggy was always blonde, sometimes a French resistance officer, at other times an American damsel in distress. Bucky always had a smart mouth, but they never showed him braiding his sister’s hair. The Howlies were always stock-soldiers. Sometimes Bucky looked ten, and the Commandos didn't exist.

 _Tony,_ _  
_ _  
_ _Knock it off._

_-SGR_

One of the films has him and Peggy squirrel away to an unused corner of the SSR base in London, his movie counterpart rips her blouse open. Steve, before he can collect himself, dashes the computer against the tiled floor of the kitchen. He doesn’t stop until the wired innards are thoroughly mangled.

They’d never done that— he and Peggy. Ever. He’d wanted to, Christ, how he’d wanted it. Captain America had taken this from him too, had turned it into something perverse and packaged for mass-consumption.

He sweeps up the debris and deposits it with the rest of the trash. _There,_ he thinks, now nobody would be the wiser.

He finds out later that they’d had his apartment bugged from the start. That’s taken from him too.

—  
 

Sam had helped him make the move from D.C. to Brooklyn. They’d loaded the boxes, packed by Natasha and Clint, into the back of a storage van and driven up the eastern coast for hours.

After, Sam had stayed with him, helping to slot spoons into the cutlery drawer, and unpacks the table when Steve leaves it in the box too long.

He’s still there when Steve gets a text from an unknown number: _'We’re going on an assassin hunt'_

Natasha is at the door two minutes later; her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

“There’s a lead. It’s shaky, but it’s better than nothing.”

Steve will take _anything_ , and he says so.

She nods, and says nothing else. So much of what she says, Steve thinks, is in her silences.

The gnawing worry has begun to manifest by the time they pile into the back of Natasha’s black car and sit idling on the street waiting for Clint for twenty minutes.. The what-ifs of finding Bucky; the what-nexts if they didn’t.

When Clint turns up, he’s out of breath. He mumbles something about a dog before tossing his quiver in-between the seats. Half of his hair sticks up straight.

Natasha hums in response.

The drive to the airstrip is an hour. The flight is eight hours long. Steve asks where Natasha’s got the plane, but she only tells him that she was owed a favour, and leaves it there.  
  
He hasn’t been to the Balkans since ‘44. The last time he was here they had camped out in forests for two weeks with a group of communist partisans until they’d managed to reach the HYDRA base in Northern Greece.

He’d read that Yugoslavia, with its army of partisans, was the only country in Europe which had liberated itself from the Nazis. A lifetime has passed since then.

“What do you hope for?” Steve had asked one of them through their British translator seventy years before as Bucky sat by his side, cleaning his rifle.

The man had fiddled constantly with the red star at the front of his hat, twisting it to and fro. He had paused for a moment before answering: “Шанса за живот.”

_A chance for life._

Bucky had left after that, stood up with the excuse that he needed to take a piss, and then wandered off to sit alone. Steve had followed.

It doesn’t look anything like it had in ‘44. The paved roads, pitted with age, were still dirt in Steve’s memory. When they stop for food, the sounds of modern  American music pour through the speakers: electric and artificial and jarring. They serve coca-cola in glass bottles.

They’d hunched over rough maps of the HYDRA base on the flight over, and when they pile back into the car they’re prepared. Tense and ready for resistance as they round the corners of the narrow mountainous roads.

His heart pounds in anticipation: one, two, three, four—

The HYDRA base is abandoned. The files had been torched. Natasha kicks through ash with the toe of her boot, cool and appraising. In a separate room, there’s a chair that’s been warped by the fire, it’s restraints twisted and it’s leather seat cracked and puckered. There’s nothing else. Before he can register what he’s doing, he’s slammed his shield into a wall with a cry of frustration.

He’s silent on the way back, past the buildings, alternating between gaudy luxury and destitution.

_Nothing._

He tries not to feel crushed by the sudden despair. He instead thinks of the partisans who had fought in these forests seventy years prior; if this now unfamiliar country was the chance of life of which they had dreamed as they died.

—

Before the War, he’d read books about his father’s War. Novels and memoirs were a luxury that his mother was too poor to afford, and he had taken them out from the Brooklyn Public Library instead.

Bucky had teased him and teased him about too much reading, even though Bucky had always been the more studious of the two.

He can afford to buy books now, and he does. He leaves them lying half-hazard and tipping on every and any surface in the apartment. There are books shoved into the dusty crannies under his bed, and books that have been wedged behind the seats of his couch.

He buys books on his father’s War, because they seem easier than books about his own.

_“One had to go on living because it was less trouble than finding a way out, but the early ideals of the War were all shattered, trampled into the mud which covered the bodies of those with whom I had shared them. What was the use of hypocritically seeking out exalted consolations for death, when I knew so well that there were none?... I knew now that death was the end and that I was quite alone.”_

He breathes.

 _“That all my past years — the childhood of which I have no one, now, to share the remembrance — should be buried in this grave on the top of a mountain, in lofty silence, the singing unearthly stillness, of these remote forests! At every turn of every future road I shall want to ask him questions to recall to him memories,and he will not be there.”_  

He doesn’t read much anymore.

—

On Thursdays, he visits Peggy. The first time he’d come here after the ice he’d trembled like a leaf, and afterwards he had cried, long and hard, for the first time since 1945. 

She has a cabinet in the corner of her room with a radio and record player built in. At the bottom are her records, some in their sleeves, some in neat albums, arranged in a row by her and Daniel’s children.

On good days she’ll instruct him on what to play.

It’s here that he first hears [ Kitty Kallen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dh3Ape1GmU), longing and mournful and voice full of yearning. It brings him to tears, and he doesn’t try to hide it.

“Oh, Steve,” Peggy says when she sees, her fingers encircling his own.

On bad days, the music leaves him feeling angry and bitter.

“Vera Lynn,” he picks up one of the albums, his mouth stuttering towards a half-smile. “God, I had the biggest crush on her. Do you remember when they had me on her radio—”

Peggy’s face has slackened, eyes wandering uncomprehendingly over his face. He falters.

“Steve?” Her mouth works for a few moments, speechless. “You’re here? How are you here?” Her voice cracks at the end.

He smiles for her benefit, and afterwards goes for lunch to Sam.

He finds several of Kitty Kallen’s albums in the window of a thrift store and buys them. He finds Vera Lynn too, but he leaves those behind.

—

Sam, sitting across from Steve, with a mountain of pancakes in between, had once told him that he thought everyone had the potential for breakdown.

“You’re in the army, and you’re doing your job, and your officers like it, the army likes it.” Sam spears a homefry on the end of his fork. “You spend years of your life honing these skills, and you’re good at your job. Then you get back and you have no idea how to behave like a civilian, and the army basically tells you ‘Fuck off and good luck, you’re on your own!’. And what the hell are those skills good for? I mean, maybe bouncing, but for a lot of people it’s crime.”

Steve swallows, nods.

“The worst thing, and the thing nobody talks about, is the boredom. You’ve got no skills, you’ve got no job, you don’t have your unit and you’re used to being on edge for so many goddamn years, and then: nothing. Squat.”

This Steve understands, the constant crawling and oppressive need to keep going, keep moving, from thrill to perverse thrill, because stopping seemed like a death wish.

“And then they turn to drugs. It’s the only way for some of them to keep going. And it’s our fault, as a society we’ve collectively set them up for failure.” Steve marvels for a moment at the calm in Sam’s voice, at the steadiness of his hands. “For me it was alcohol. I was in a bad way, man, and that’s why I try and help. I didn’t want to hear some old man who didn’t know what shit I’d been through telling me that it wasn’t my fault. Because _he didn’t know._ ”

—

At six he goes jogging, at eight-thirty he puts on the percolator to boil while he takes a shower, at—-

Steve gives a violent start; his hands stop in the act of towelling off his hair because Bucky is there standing by the sofa plain as _anything_.

Steve swears, loudly. He can hear his own heartbeat in his ears: one, two, three, four—

Bucky’s mouth twitches, as if on the verge of speaking, but he says nothing. He looks hunted, shoulders taut, eyes wandering and his left fist whirring as he clenches and unclenches it.

“Buck—” Steve says, and then there’s a flurry of movement.

“I don’t know why I’m here.” he says, edging towards one of the windows. And then: “This was a mistake." 

But even as he says it, he stops, and it gives Steve a chance to move, desperate and unthinking, to catch him by the sleeve of his jacket.

“Please,” he says, but he can’t find the words to describe the sudden lurching panic in his stomach, the entirety of the past two years out of the ice. “Please.”

Bucky only eyes him warily, eyes searching first his face, then skirting to the table, the chairs, then back to Steve, up and down. Steve drops the hand from his sleeve.

Finally, he speaks, but only to say: “Boxer-briefs?” Bucky’s face edges towards a wry smile, but falls short. “You’re a modern man, Rogers,”

“Christ,” Steve says, voice a little watery. “Christ, Buck.”

“Yeah, yeah, tell it to the Pope,” and it doesn’t matter so much the way he looks tight and drawn as he says it because he moves away from the window cautiously, and Steve is bowled over by relief.

—

He phones Sam.

“Hel-lo?”

“Hi Sam, it’s Steve.”

“Wow. I would never have guessed from the Call-ID.What’s up?”

He’s never been good at skirting around issues: “Bucky’s in the living room.”

“What? Shit.” There’s a sharp inhale across the line. “You can’t just— How?

“He just turned up, you know?”

“No, Steve, I don’t know. _Shit_.”

“He seems more—” he tries to weigh his words, shifting his grip on the phone. “—settled.”

“Steve,” the tone of Sam’s voice over the line is different, deeper, less easy to read./There’s a long pause, weighted, perhaps warning. Then, nothing.

“Sam,” his voice comes out a little desperate. “Sam, trust me, I’d know him anywhere.”

“I’m gonna drive up, okay?” He opens his mouth to object, but Sam, sensing it, cuts in: “Don’t argue.” And then, voice softening incrementally: “Trust me, man, I know. I couldn’t tell you how happy I’d be if—” He swallows audibly.  “—But you don’t come back from something like that the same. None of us come back the same. I trust you, I’m just saying— just be careful, ok?”

He puts the percolator on solely to occupy his hands. Steve’s suddenly hyperaware of every movement, of his apartment, so much grander than what he had grown up in— and _hell_ , if that didn’t indicate that he’d abandoned his principles what did?— has to set the spoon down on the counter for a moment to regain his composure. When he picks it up again, he notices that the metal has warped under the pressure of his clenched fist.

_Goddamn.  
  
_

_—  
  
_

When Sam arrives it’s with a flurry of words.

“Dude, please tell me you weren’t watching the Weather Network for the whole four and a half hours it took me to get here.”

Steve can only shrug awkwardly in response. It was the most inoffensive thing he could think of, and besides, he was still a little in awe of the cloud cover maps.

“And you,” Sam points an accusing finger at Bucky, still seated prone on the couch, much as Steve had found him. “We chased your dumb ass all over Eastern Europe while you were apparently living it up in Williamsburg and doing god knows what— drinking lattes? Or were you shooting any more of your pals from the Great Depression in the gut?”

“That the kind of guy you think I am?” Bucky responds, eyes still fixed on the television set.

“Aren’t you?”  
  
“Maybe”

And Sam is suspicious of him. He spends hours whispering urgently to Steve about the need for a psychiatric assessment, a doctor, something.

But all Steve can whisper back is: “What if they find him?”

And for that, Sam has no answer.

—

Bucky moves in, but won't sleep in the bedroom. He sleeps on the couch or sometimes next to it. He's gone for days at a time. The first time it happens, Steve is nearly sick with worry. But he comes back.

It was one thing to understand, quite rationally, how experiences could change a person. He knew it better than most. For days Sam’s words ring through his head— that none of them came back the same.

It was quite another thing to truly believe it.

The Bucky who lurked in the corners of his living room, and alternated between sarcasm-tinged conversation, and pained silences didn’t resemble the Bucky that Steve had grown up with. Not the man who was whip-smart and witty, who walked with an easy self-assurance and charmed everyone he met.

But the Bucky who Steve caught pasting over his windows with grocery flyers reminded him an uncomfortably great deal of the person who he had saved from the POW camp in Austria.

“Hey!” The only indication that Bucky had heard him was the slight tensing of his shoulders. He kept at his task of sticking the produce page to Steve’s window. “Buck!”

Bucky turns, but only slightly.

Steve goes to him, stopping a short distance away— the boundaries of propriety were still blurry— even though he yearned to reach out, to hold Bucky until the fear eased from his body.

“Buck, you can’t just—” Steve waves a hand at the window.

Bucky doesn’t say anything, just nods grimly.

“It’s not exactly inconspicuous, is it?” he tries at a joking tone.

Bucky shrugs.

He spends the rest of the night staring at the tv without seeming to watch.

The problem was that the seesawing between good days and bad days, between relative normalcy and a frightening apathy reminded him painfully of days spent in London.  Bucky had skirted the corners of the base like a shadow, equal parts menacing and fearful. He slept with a pistol under his pillow, when he slept at all. He snapped at everyone, when he was willing to talk.

“Sir, I think there’s something wrong with Sergeant Barnes,” Steve had told Philips.

“Hm?”

“He’s not himself, he’s tense, he can’t sleep—” Steve couldn’t stop his hands from clenching, as if he were gearing up for a fight. “—Sometimes he gets confused about where he is— he’s always angry. He takes too many risks.”

Philips had snorted. “Can he shoot a rifle straight? He can? It’s war, boy, it’s not a playground game. Get used to it. I’d be more concerned if he wasn’t fucking angry.”

When Bucky had fallen, Steve had lost it. He’d felt the unbearable guilt down to his bones: Bucky had stayed for him— POWs were otherwise given honourable discharges— and Steve had known something was wrong, felt it to his core, and for once in his life he hadn’t pushed to point hard enough.

This time, he doesn’t know what to do. So he sits with Bucky through the silences, and buys blackout curtains the next day. He spends the evening stringing them up on the brass curtain-rods.

When Bucky wanders over, part-way through, Steve asks: “Cosy, isn’t it?”  
  
Bucky snorts in response, not a laugh, but not angry either.

—

He has frequent nightmares. They are no longer of mundane things made hellish by the fog of childhood. Now, he near always dreams of the War.

Sometimes Steve listens for the smooth inhale, exhale from the living room which signals that Bucky is asleep. He matches his breathing, tries to calm his stuttering heartbeat, and waits for the moment that sleep pulls him back under.  
  
On the bad nights he awakes with sweated-through sheets and the taste of fear thick on his tongue. His nerves sing and sleep is unimaginable. He propels himself out of bed on those nights, wild and on-edge.

Bucky’s nights, Steve realises, are often bad.

There are nights they meet in the middle. Steve listens for the smooth inhale, exhale from the living room, but doesn’t find it. There are nights that Bucky leaves. At other times, Steve finds him twirling a rifle or knife between his fingers, eyes fixed on the blacked-out windows. He sits like this the entire night, and the entire day that follows. He often does rounds, sometimes of Steve’s apartment, sometimes of the entire building. He checks for wiretaps, vantage points, crannies where a man could hide unnoticed.

But other times Steve goes to pour himself a glass of water from the pitcher, and Bucky trails him like a shadow. Steve pours a second glass, and then they sit silently drinking at the kitchen table.

He remembers sitting on the fire-escape of his own tenement at age fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, with Bucky, their knees bumping and drinking cheap whiskey when his mother was working night-shift. It had been so easy to laugh then, with Bucky’s warm hand reaching out to shove at his shoulders as he, with his uncanny knack for imitation, crooned Marlene Dietrich [songs](https://youtu.be/Ky7FAtZDVp4) at Steve. In those moments, he’d thought that Bucky was the most beautiful person in the world.

Bucky doesn’t sing now.

—

Steve writes to Jim Morita’s son to ask about photos, with the knowledge that the Howlies hadn’t liked Bucky. They respected him, at least around Steve, but he was never allowed into their easy camaraderie. They had known each other before Steve entered the picture, and that had perhaps made all the difference. It wasn’t just that he’d been labelled Barnes the Queer. That had been as affectionate an epithet as any; and the army was full of queer men. All of the Howlies had, at one point, flexed their muscles for the chaplain’s assistant, and asked if he’d had a fella back home.

It was that Bucky was unpredictable. That he’d been honed to a raw savagery that seemed to exceed the bounds of even shakey battle morality.

The first time Steve had seen him in action, they’d been crouched in bushes as an unwitting German sentry had patrolled just a hair-breaths away. Before any of them could react, Bucky had already launched himself at the man, taken him down bodily, and plunged a knife into his throat and _sawed._

Steve had thought he was going to be sick, but all Bucky did was wipe his bloody hands clean on the trousers of his uniform, and then spat into the dirt as if it were a game of baseball.

They weren’t extracted until a week later, and the handprints had remained on his uniform until they were safely deposited back at SSR headquarters.

He can’t remember how they reacted when Bucky had fallen. Steve can’t remember most of the week that had lapsed. His ears had rung, and he had burned with the constant adrenaline. He didn’t sleep. He’d never wanted to kill anyone, but he had been wild, and he had killed more men than he could count that week alone.

When the reply comes, it’s in an envelope crammed full of glossy copies of photos from the War. Their corners are clean and crisp, and show Morita as a young recruit in 1940 through to 43, then a gap— the time spent in Azzano— before continuing once more, this time with Steve featuring prominently.

There’s only a single photo that shows Bucky alone: caught mid-dance on a stage with fruit on his head dressed as Carmen Miranda. And Steve can’t help but huff out a laugh, because he had nearly forgot about this. And how could he have forgotten?

[](https://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=126832buckindrag.png)

Soldier shows were a ridiculous quirk that seemed to have died with the war. Steve had been dubious— the very thought of GIs doing female impersonation made him picture brawny men stomping around in dresses for laughs. That idea hadn’t sat well with him. What he wasn’t expecting was for the production to be taken so seriously, and more than that, that it’d been _good._

He certainly wasn’t expecting Bucky to get talked round to joining in— his reputation as one of the best dancers on base seemed to have spread. But he had, and for a brief window the war, and the rift it had produced, seemed to melt away. Steve’ body was impossibly large, he still sometimes got tangled up in his own limbs, but Bucky was smiling. It had been easy to imagine, for a moment, that they were back in Brooklyn.

The Bucky who lives on Steve’s couch is less nostalgic about the whole thing. He peers over Steve’s shoulder, only to ask, a little suspiciously: “Who is that?”

“It’s you,” Steve holds the photo out so that it can be inspected more closely.

Bucky looks incredulously from the photo, to Steve, and back to the photo.

“You did the cancan,” Steve supplies helpfully.

“I—” Bucky gawps for a moment. “I did what?”

“The cancan,” Steve reminds him.

And Christ. It sounded funny now, but Steve remembers with a painful clarity how Bucky had let them do him up in a skirt fashioned out of parachute silk. He’d cocked a hip on stage, his cheekbones pink with rouge, and he’d shot a wink at Steve when the music started. Steve’s mouth had gone immediately dry.

Bucky had cornered him after the show, sweaty, and with his lips still stained red.

“How'd you like it?”

Steve had tried to look anywhere other than Bucky’s mouth, but his voice betrayed him by sounding oddly tight: “Didn’t realise you were such a gymnast, Buck.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’m a regular Dick Grayson.”

And then he had kissed Steve a little sloppily, tasting of waxy lipstick and whiskey. When he pulled away for breath, Steve could see it smeared across Bucky’s chin. The both of them likely looked debauched, but Steve could feel the hard length of Bucky’s cock against his thigh, and he couldn't seem to care.

If Bucky remembers any of this, he makes no indication.

Steve catches him looking at the photo several times over the days that follow with furtive movements. It amuses him as much as it makes him hanker for the past, because Bucky had always been a little vain. Preening over his hair in the mirror, loading it with pomade and getting the part down to a straight sharp razor edge. He’d liked it when girls did double-takes as he’d walked by.  
  
At the beginning, Steve had wondered how somebody as beautiful as Bucky could love somebody like him. It had seemed a small miracle in the midst of illness, poverty, and desperation.  
  
He tries not to dwell on it, but it’s easier said than done. They’ve settled into an easy living arrangement: Bucky in the living room, Steve in his room, and the borderlands of meals eaten together. He tries not to hope for more, because he’s felt sick with the longing for years. Peggy, Bucky, Brooklyn. Lord knows, he’ll take what he can get.

Time ticks by, slowly, reliably: runs, percolator, shower—  
  
And then Bucky is there when he wakes one morning, standing uneasily in the doorway, running his flesh-and-blood hand through his hair.  
  
“Buck?” Steve can’t keep the worry from his voice.  
  
“Steve, I—” Bucky’s jaw clamps shut, Steve can see the flex-unflex-flex of the muscles. “I don’t remember this,” he says, holding out the photo of himself. “I don’t remember near a goddamn thing.”  
  
Steve has to swallow the sudden lump from his throat.  
  
“But I want to.”

Steve lets out his breath, slow and heavy, before speaking. “Okay.” He says, and then “Okay.” once more, because he can’t think of what to say, of how to put his flitting thoughts to words. This was something almost tangible, something on which to grasp, when all he had been doing for years was drifting.

—  
 

Daily he is struck by how little had actually changed since his own youth. The demonstrations then had been endless: everything from protests against raising the price of milk, to the NSL pickets in front of Brooklyn college against tuition increases, against the Spanish Civil War, against the big business bosses. The pamphleteers and Communist newspaper hawkers were innumerable. He had the science of painting a placard down to an art:

 _The Right to Organise on Job! Save and Strengthen Rent Controls! Freedom Not Fascism!_  
  
It had always felt like they were on the precipice of change. One more step, one more move, and all injustices would simply crumble away.  
  
Now the Soviet Union had collapsed, seemingly overnight, and not only for Steve. All the shapes of its failures, and Christ, there were many, had been laid bare. The Trotskyists who had been treated as heretics by the Party and YCL seemed to have been right. Even worse, the United States had spent most of the twentieth century poking its fingers into Latin America, waging war, and signing Free Trade deals. And there aren’t many protests outside Brooklyn College any longer.  
  
He tells all this to Bucky, who, for likely the first time in his life, doesn’t roll his eyes at Steve.  
  
“What’s the working class gotta do to just catch a break, eh?”  
  
Bucky, circa 1941, had always scoffed and told Steve that he needed to take a break, because “Lord, you’ve got a chip on your shoulder a mile wide, pal.”

Now he just eyes Steve over a spoon of cereal, half incredulous, more than a little puzzled. As if staring hard enough would let him fathom out what it is that makes Steve tick.  
  
It had been impossible to sit still in 1935, 1936, 1937—. He remembered shouting himself hoarse on bad-asthma days and getting punched by someone who’d picked him out as an easy target leaving pickets for striking food service workers. Bucky had called him an idiot, but he’d been the one who had learned how to administer epinephrine injections when a nebulizer wasn’t enough to clear his airways, and he’d been the one who went with Steve to boo students who’d crossed the picket line.  
  
It’s impossible to sit still now: 2012, 2013, 2014— Only now he’s no longer so sure of what to do.  
  
“Hi Sam, it’s Steve. Is this a bad time?” There’s the rhythmic sound of chopping in the background. Even, predictable, and signalling dinner preparation.  
  
“Nah, I’ve got you on speakerphone.” The sound of a knife scraping a cutting board clean, and then a moment of calm before it picks up again.

“Bucky told me that he wants to remember”  
  
“Yeah?” Sam pauses. “What do you think of that?”

“I don’t know how to help, I mean—”  
  
“Oh Motherfu—” there’s a clattering on the other end of the line, before Sam manages to get out: “I got lemon juice in my eye.”  
  
Steve’s read the file multiple times. It leaves him feeling sicker with each reading. There are procedures detailed with clinical detachment: prep, wiping, cryofreeze, repeat; It sounds less like they refer to a human, and more as if they’re talking of a machine. Bone-breaks, gun-shot wounds, burns, shrapnel, nerve damage, bone-bruises—  
  
It’s near unfathomable to imagine that it were a thing from which someone could return.  
  
But somehow Bucky had, against all odds.  
  
It was easier, in 1936, even when the whole world had seemed against him, to go out and fight. To attend rallies and shout down scabs. He was determined to move the entire world through sheer-stubbornness and a dumb-will.  
  
But he feels powerless now. Days spent watching Bucky listing from bathroom, to couch, to kitchen. Talking of the past doesn’t help. Bucky doesn’t tell him to stop when he brings up dancing Shag or puking in the gutter on Fourth Avenue, but Steve has known him a lifetime, and can read the angle of his mouth, his eyes, the way his hand brushes the tabletop in frustration.  
  
And he doesn’t blame him. Because while Steve had spent the twentieth century sleeping, Bucky had spent the intervening years being told a life-history that was not his. Being sculpted from a bright young man into a weapon of war.  
  
And the telling by HYDRA was not the same as the telling by Steve, except in the vein that they were both untenable. Both were unverifiable fragments of a story to which Bucky’s mind could hold no claim.  
  
The difference is that sometimes when Steve tells him about Christmas ‘43, or lying in the sand at Rockaway Beach, Bucky responds with a slight upturn of his mouth. Too sad to be a smile, but close enough that it makes Steve ache.

—

  
There’s a text from Natasha sometime after that.  
  
_'Some Nazis hiding in the Manhattan sewers. You want in?’  
_  
And if there’s one thing that Steve has never been good at, it’s standing aside.  
  
_'Yes. -SGR’_ he texts, and then tells Bucky that he’ll be out on a job. He’s met with a nod.

It’s a Tuesday, and there’s no time for Sam to drive up from D.C., so it’s Natasha, Clint and Steve once again with new tech, courtesy of Tony.  
  
“What _is_ the new tech?” he asks, strapping himself into the back of the car. There isn’t enough room for his legs to stretch out comfortably, but he tries to ignore it.

“A smoke arrow, a net arrow, a boomerang arrow,” Natasha counts them off on her fingers when they’re stopped at a red light.

“A USB arrow,” Clint supplies helpfully.  
  
“A USB arrow.” She counts that off on her pinky. “And this.” She pulls a large gun, glowing faintly green, from beneath the dashboard.  
  
Steve doesn’t miss the way Clint looks at her fondly.  
  
The sewers are decidedly Steve’s least-favourite place to launch an ambush. But they do. It’s dimly lit and putrid-smelling. The dank air makes it difficult to get a hold on the HYDRA-agents who slip repeatedly through his fingers. One manages to land a blow on Steve’s shoulder before he’s subdued.

After they’ve been cuffed in a line, Natasha claps her hands together and says: “See? Easy-peasy, boys.”

Clint, who’s face is caked with grime, and whose left boot has gone missing, mutters: “Yeah, sure.” under his breath.

Natasha shoots him a look, and then calls for back-up.  
  
Steve’s sticky with sweat the entire ride back; hair curling at his temples and his shirt clinging to the breadth of his shoulders. He still takes the stairs two at a time, only dimly aware of the smell which wafts up the stairwell.  
  
His only thought is of getting into the shower as quickly as possibly once he’s locked, relocked the front door.  
  
“Buck?” he calls from the entry-way. “I’m back.”  
  
He’s greeted with silence, and so ventures further into the apartment.  
  
He finds Bucky sitting in the kitchen with an empty glass before him.

“Buck?”  
  
He looks to Steve as if noticing him for the first time, his forehead creasing, and mouth working weakly.  
  
His immediate thought is to think of Sam, who had told him that Bucky really ought to go for a medical evaluation. The memory pricks him so that he’s consumed by a sudden regretful fear.  
  
“The smell,” Bucky says finally, faintly.  
  
Steve had noticed it in the staircase. A vaguely greasy scent which suggested that one of their neighbours had been cooking. He tells Bucky so.  
  
“No,” and then, more firmly. “No. It smells like your cooking.”

“Haha. That’s very funny.”  
  
“No, Christ. It _smells_ like your cooking.” His hands go to his hair, tugging at the roots and Steve notices, for the first time, that Bucky’s usually steady hands were shaking. “It smells like... cabbage.”    
  
He’s looking at Steve desperately, before he raises his hands to cover his face and takes a single unsteady breath.  
  
And Steve remembers with a bowling force: eating fried cabbage with crusty heels of stale bread; browning it in butter to be mixed with potatoes for colcannon, and eating it in watery stews on their couch, Bucky’s feet in his lap.

Bucky gets up to busy himself with getting a drink, keeping his back turned and his shoulders held stiffly.  
  
Steve takes that as his cue to make himself scarce for the moment, and heads to the shower.  
  
Later, drinking tea on opposite ends of the sofa, Bucky tells him that he doesn’t remember, not really: “I smelt it, and it just hit me: your cooking. But there’s nothing there, nothing tied to it. Just this phantom sense?”  
  
Steve lets him talk, and then reaches to grasp Bucky by the shoulder. Its an instinctual action from another time, not dampened by the fact that it’s the unyielding metal arm that meets his fingertips.  Bucky doesn’t shrug him off.

  
—

Nothing changes, insofar that it does. Steve buys a cabbage, and Bucky stands watch over the frying pan as Steve mashes potatoes.  
  
“My arms always used to get tired from this,” he tells Bucky. “Guess the serum was good for something.”  
  
Bucky only snorts in response, and doesn’t look over from where he’s hunched over the frying pan in concentration, armed with a wooden spoon.  
  
When it’s all said and done, Steve thinks dimly that he wasn’t half the cook that Mrs. Barnes was. Bucky doesn’t seem to think the same thing, because he manages to put away nearly half the pot. Between the two of them, there are no left-overs.  
  
As with most things, the incident fades back into the veil of normalcy, and the only remnant is the hope it kindles.  
  
He doesn’t tell Sam about it, though he can’t say why. Not even when Sam comes to help Steve install an air conditioner at the beginning of June. It’s hot and muggy in a way that used to make breathing difficult for Steve, but now just leaves him unable to sleep and perpetually in need of a shower.  
  
“You hold that end,” Sam grunts, attempting to maneuver the back of the air conditioner through the open window.  
  
Steve holds the whole thing.  
  
“Okay, showoff. If that’s how to want to play it—”  
  
It takes far longer than it should, and the only relief is successfully turning on the air-conditioner after their third try.  
  
“Praise the lord,” is all Sam says, and Steve is inclined to agree with him. Even Bucky seems appreciative, although he doesn’t venture too near when Sam is around.  
  
After they sit around with bottles of beer, only slightly sweating, as Sam fiddles with the DVD player.

“A true classic from my youth,” he says, as the title screen comes up to show ‘Dirty Dancing’.  
  
Steve can’t get to sleep that night, even though he’s near exhaustion when he heads to bed. He flips from back to stomach and back again, and only manages to half-doze before he calls the effort off. Perhaps it’s because of the unnatural coolness, a luxury which nobody he knew growing up could afford. Some businesses were cooled, the Lithographers on Grand Street had been the first in Brooklyn, predating even Steve’s birth.

Growing up had been a constant struggle between his lungs and the weather. Dampness, regardless of temperature, was likely to set off an asthma attack. Dry cold air equally so. Now he can breathe clearly, and sometimes it’s still a marvel. He chalks the lack of sleep up to this, the phantom memory of nights spent with trepidation in the dry winter months, waiting for the reliable tightness of chest and wheeze that came on its tails. The thing that everyone seemed to get wrong about asthma was that it _hurt._

“Jesus, Rogers,” he mumbles to himself. Nothing like a round of 2am misplaced nostalgia and self-pity to start the day.

He manages to startle Bucky, who’s up and mumbling “praise the lord,” to himself while fiddling with the air conditioner dials.  
  
He tries to place the words, and their familiarity, and finally does: “Are you mocking Sam?”  
  
Bucky whips around, looking at once caught-out and guarded.  
  
“No,” he says, but he’s no longer meeting Steve’s gaze. His fists are balled at his side. “No, I— but what he said it— what’s ‘Praise the lord and pass the ammunition’ from? An army thing? Or…”  
  
A HYDRA thing? Is left unspoken.  
  
He looks even more unnerved when Steve barks out a laugh.  
  
“Oh Christ, of all the things,” Steve is a little hysterical with it, because once is chance, and two times _may_ be a coincidence— but this was—  
  
Bucky’s looking surlier with each passing moment, so Steve fills him in: “It’s from a song; a song from the War.”  
  
And Steve, who’s sometimes overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information available on the internet is suddenly beyond grateful for it. He pulls [ the song ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUOPvtVZwo8) up on his cell-phone, and lets it play for Bucky’s benefit.  
  
Bucky mouths along to “You’ve got to give him credit, for a son of a gun of a gunner was he,” before he’s looking surlier than before.  
  
“This song is a fucking joke,” Bucky says finally, baring his teeth in revulsion.  
  
“It is. You _hated_ it.”

Bucky shakes his head a little incredulously before meeting Steve’s eye. And Steve, who was used to analysing the many moods of Bucky Barnes since childhood, finds the expression unreadable. He only smiles tightly in response, not wanting to give away the sudden inner turmoil, the buffeting emotions of hope and despair, alternating with ferocity. He doesn’t want to place the burden onto Bucky’s shoulders.  
  
What he says is: “It’s a damn catchy song, though.”  
  
And Bucky shakes his head again, as if to dispel his own thoughts, and says nothing. He must agree though, because for the entirety of the week that follows, Steve catches him mumbling the lyrics under his breath like a dying man’s mantra.

—

Tony had once sat across from him at a conference table, fingers shifting the sunglasses on his face down and up his nose, while his right hand was occupied with his cell-phone, tap, tap, tapping with astonishing speed.

Steve had said something about their salaries, because the topic had itched at him since he’d first seen the bank statement: bloated and so absurd that he’d half been convinced it was another dream.  
  
“Higher stress, higher stakes, higher pay.” Tony had said without looking up, fingers still tap, tap, tapping. “Only fair, Cap.”

Steve wasn’t so sure that the stakes were higher, or that the stress was greater. He remembers the ache of menial labour, the way it had hurt to drag his swollen legs at the end of the day. How money was so tight at the end of months that they’d sometimes skip meals to make ends meet. He can still recite the prices, long ingrained in muscle memory from years of penny-pinching: 15 to 20 cents for a peck of potatoes; 7 cents for a loaf of bread; 13 cents for a quart of milk.  
  
The worst had been the worry about Bucky, who sometimes worked construction when ends were tight. The neighbourhood was filled with old labourers and ex-dock workers with their arthritic joints and faces wrinkled and spotted from a lifetime working under the harsh sun. It wasn’t only that construction was hard on the body, but men died on sites with alarming frequency, and those who survived rarely lived long lives.  
  
And the thing that rankled him most, reflecting on this, and with Tony’s fingers still dancing over his cell-phone, was that there hadn’t been any real choice. Suffer through the work, or live on the street— a looming and very real possibility. One that his mother had to weather as Steve had grown up, one that she had worked herself sick trying to avoid.  
  
He was fairly certain that the hot-shot bosses never had to worry about falling through unstable roof-beams to their deaths, or else catching pneumonia and being unable to afford a visit to the doctor.  
  
He had geared up for a fight, but Tony hadn’t noticed, and Steve had ultimately left.  
  
It’s the memory of this that makes going to the grocery store feel like a small miracle in the midst of the sea of disillusionment.  
  
It’s becomes more miraculous still when Bucky ventures out with him, sticking close to his side and pretending to read the signs for cucumbers and bell peppers while warily surveying the parameters of the shop.  
  
Steve loads everything into the basket in a way that would have been unimaginable in his previous life. The prices are ludicrously, impossibly high, sometimes he still gets thrown off by the sight of them, but his salary is also ludicrously, impossibly high.  
  
He piles peaches and plums and apricots into bags, because he knows Bucky likes them. Steve buys three pineapples because Bucky had done a double-take when he had seen them.  
  
“We’re living the ritzy life, eh, Buck?” he asks, a little over-eager, balancing two pineapples in his left hand, and brandishing the other by the leaves in his right.  
  
He’s rewarded with the very faintest amused smile quickly hidden by Bucky brushing by his shoulder, suddenly hyper-interested in a tray of dragon-fruits. Steve watches Bucky’s bent back, his hair illuminated by the harsh fluorescent lighting, and the way he intently mouths ‘durian’ and ‘lychee’ to himself, and can’t stop the way his heart leaps into his throat.

—  
  
Some days feel remarkably easy. He gets home one evening from a HYDRA-raid to find Bucky watching baseball with his feet propped up on the arm of the couch. It was something that even Steve himself hadn’t done since the 40s, when they’d crowded the radio at the Barnes’ to listen to ‘Dem Boys’ play. Charlie had always elbowed his way to the front, eager to hear if Pee Wee Reese had hit one home.  
  
And it somehow doesn’t matter as much that he’s sweating something awful, or that half his shirt beneath his jacket is soaked through with someone else’s blood. Hope suddenly feels tangible and real beneath his fingers. If he just reached out, he might be able to grasp it.  
  
There are bad days when Bucky leaves entirely, or else skirts the corners of the apartment like a caged animal, irritable and unpredictable and hostile. He lashes out if Steve gets in his way, if Steve tries to comfort him, if Steve tries, tries, tries— And there are days when Steve wakes up with his head in 1945 and begins to feel choked by the what-ifs, by the painful ache for what time had snatched. He thinks of Rebecca Barnes, who’d died of breast cancer only aged forty-three; of their childhood friends, of days spent in Prospect Park, never to be repeated.  
  
Things are better now than they once were. He had Sam, and Bucky, and this precarious existence, but it didn’t, possibly would never, compare to the memory of Peggy, young and vivacious; of the Barnes family who’d treated him as one of their own; of his mother, whose death was the only one he’d properly grieved, and still it stung; and of Bucky, young and whole, unburdened of the weight of the War.  
  
But there are days now where Bucky watches baseball, and he bumps his leg to Steve’s as Steve makes his way to the shower. Precious moments when he smiles, small and private, a secret contained by the walls of the building.  
  
“Something funny?” Bucky asks, when he catches Steve smiling over a pan of grilled cheeses.  
  
When Steve shakes his head no, smile still tugging at his lips, Bucky elbows him out of the way until Steve surrenders the spatula.

—

The urgency of forcing Bucky to remember dissipated somewhere in the space between shared late-night glasses of water, and the clean satisfaction of 6-4-3 double plays on the television. Bucky might not remember crying more than Steve had himself after Sarah Rogers had died, but Steve did.  
  
And if the interceding two years since the ice had been filled with a frantic need to move, the present no longer demanded it. He had spent the two years keeping everyone, including himself, at bay. Trying to distance himself from the hurt and and the sharp cut of trauma.  
  
Taking up boxing had been part of it. A way to move, move, move until exhaustion overtook him and he could finally sleep. Bucky had taught him to box in ‘41, a futile gesture at helping Steve pass the medical examination at the volunteer centre. And in 2012, a lifetime later, Steve had returned to its reliable familiarity.

He takes Bucky with him now on the back of his motorbike down the residential streets south of East New York Avenue; past laundromats and store-front church ministries: _“Trust in the Lord with All Thine Heart!”_ _  
_ _  
_ It’s the first time Bucky’s been on his bike, the first time they’ve been so far from home, but Bucky’s breathing is even today against his back, the flutter of it against the side of Steve’s neck is reassuring.  
  
It is all the more precious for the knowledge that there are days when it is not: weeks earlier in the grocery store when he’d been startled by a child, flinched away, and the spent the intervening week in a state of agitation and anger; the times when the smell of burnt food makes him go away in his own head; the times when nothing at all happens when he stares vacant and does rounds rounds rounds with a pistol shoved down the waistband of his pants.  
  
Today is not that day. He scans warily as Steve unlocks the gym: the roof, the windows, the trees. But he’s present, watches Steve keenly as he makes his way through punching bags. The desperation in Steve’s punches has been weathered, the bite of them no longer so sharp. He only goes through three bags before Bucky stands to watch.  
  
“You’re not—” he makes an aborted gesture before crouching down so that he’s level with Steve’s knees and tugs Steve’s left leg backwards. “The form is wrong.”  
  
And then he plays dance-instructor, and Steve sees him as he was in 1934, hair slicked with pomade and a fat lip after a match. Watching Bucky during his matches had aroused the same feelings as watching him dance, the movements smooth and practiced. Once Steve had warned him that he better watch his face, or he’d end up looking like Robert Graves. But Bucky had only scoffed, he didn’t know who Robert Graves was, and in any case, he never did end up getting a broken nose.  
  
“Why don’t you give it a go?” Steve asks now, while letting Bucky correct the twist of his arms, the way he angles his knuckles against the bag.  
  
“Nah.”  
  
But he lets Steve goad him into it, and the difference between their movements is marked. Steve’s movements sharp and angry, speaking of frustration, while Bucky’s were languid, almost graceful. The twist, untwist of his arm muscles, the way he held his back, straight without the brittleness of rigidity.  
  
With one misjudged hit of his left arm, the bag goes flying, and with it the sense of easy calm.  
  
Bucky stares after it stonily and braces his shoulders for a fight, his chest heaves. Steve tries for calm:“You know how many times I’ve done that?” he tries to place a reassuring hand on Bucky’s shoulder, but is immediately and curtly shrugged off.  
  
“Steve. Just—” Bucky looks out to where the bag has landed clear across the room, blank-faced in a way that makes Steve’s insides twist up.

“Right after the serum, I went chasing after a HYDRA agent bare-footed, but I didn’t know my own strength,” he’d never told Bucky about this before. He’d taken himself too seriously, even during the War. “And I ended up running straight through the front window of a bridal store. There was glass everywhere and people were screaming. At least I’m the only one around to see this, huh?”  
  
“Steve, you’re an idiot. It’s not the same, ok?”  
  
“Yeah, I’m the idiot who wanted that. I asked for it, you never did.”  
  
Bucky’s face crumples at that, and he says nothing for a long while after they ride home on the bike.

He remains silent through dinner, even after Steve overcooks the spaghetti and undercooks the spinach.  
  
Steve leaves him to his silence after dinner and instead busies himself with the DVD player. He likes the routine of evening films, and the sound of the DVD as it’s popped out of the case; the faint whirr of the player itself; the fact that there’s no noisy patrons to _shhh_ in annoyance.  
  
_It Happened One Night_ is familiar, and he chooses it because of the uncertainty of the day. In any case, it’s hard to go wrong with Clark Gable. He’d watched all of his films, less for the cinematic value, and more for the fact that Clark Gable’s roguish moustache did things for him  
  
How many times he and Bucky went to see the film in theatres, he can’t say, but watching it brought to mind the sunburns of the summer of ‘34; drinking warm beers with Bucky’s older cousins; Steve’s first time being drunk; the smell of the water at Brighton Beach. His mother had still been alive then, and he remembers seeing it with her too, and then helping her to stretch the washing over a clothesline. He doesn’t pause the film when he gets up for a drink of water, the building of the wall of jericho is as familiar as an old friend.

Instead he listens the rain, the quips about trumpets and the Israelites, and waits for _“Perhaps you’re interested in how a man undresses,”_ and then peaks his head out the kitchen door [to watch](https://youtu.be/9zUaNKBQ04c). He remembers the shock he’d had, watching it for the first time, when Peter had stripped off his shirt to reveal that he wasn’t, in fact, wearing an undershirt.  
  
He still likes the scene, the way Clark Gable had shucked off his suspenders and talked a mile a minute about hats. It didn’t help that Claudette Colbert was a real looker.  
  
He’s about to say as much, to break the silence, when he registers Bucky standing from his spot in the armchair, eyebrows furrowed, before Bucky says, in time with Clark Gable on screen: “Besides, the Walls of Jericho will protect you from the big bad wolf—”  
  
And then he rounds on Steve, who can only stand a little dumbstruck and gaping, and says, incredulously and accompanied by an accusing finger: “Really, Rogers, you and Clark Gable? _Still?”_  

Steve gives crying a good thought, and gives further thought still to the fact that out of the many things that might be recalled from their shared past, it had to be his questionable celebrity crush at age sixteen.  
  
His thinking is cut short when Bucky lurches towards him, his finger still raised and face unreadable. He kisses Steve desperately, uncoordinated in a way that spoke of years of disuse. His hands scrabble for purchase, the left clamping down on the collar of Steve’s shirt, the other tangling in his hair. His teeth clack awkwardly against Steve’s when he parts his mouth.

When he pulls back, his breathing is ragged, and Steve is uncomfortably hard. But Bucky doesn’t move away. Instead he tugs his hair back from his face, and mutters a shaky “Shit,” under his breath.  
  
Somewhere in the distance the film still plays, and Steve can hear Alexander Andrews demand from 1934: “What is it? What is it?!”

And then Bucky looks to him once more, and the accusing finger comes back up, and he says simply: “And Vera— goddamn —Lynn.”  
  
And Steve, ears suddenly burning, can only laugh as the tears burn his eyes.

—

  
On Thursday he visits Peggy.  
  
Peggy’s eldest, Harrison, is on the way out with a newspaper tucked under his arm when Steve arrives.  
  
“Captain,” he gives Steve a cursory nod. “Mum’s having a good day.”  
  
The bad days had begun to outnumber the good, and it was a fact which was painful and difficult to reconcile. Often the advent of a single good day was only a harbinger for the worse that were yet to come.  
  
He can only nod thankfully in response.  
  
Inside, someone, the live-in carer or Harrison had shifted Peggy to a chair by an open window. Outside the magnolia trees had blossomed, and the faint scent of their waxy petals was carried in with the wind. There’s a record spinning on the player in the corner, but Steve can’t place the song.  
  
“Who’s that? Doris Day?” Steve bends to kiss Peggy on the cheek, brushing the stray hairs from her face.  
  
“Hmm, no,” she thinks for a moment. “It’s Jo Stafford. [ Shrimp Boats. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZnRmcvdu1A) ”  
  
“I saw Harrison outside, he looks well.”  
  
Peggy looks to her hands, stretches them out before her in the sun.  
  
“He’s retiring. He wants to buy a boat and do Lord only knows what,” she’s smiling faintly, eyes fixed on the tree. Steve is momentarily mesmerized by the soft rise and fall of her chest; by the grey of her hair and the steady brown of her eyes which speak of years of hardship and endurance.  
  
But there will never be a day when the knowledge of the life she had lived without him doesn’t prick him with jealousy. Her children are older than Steve is himself.  
  
“Staring is rude, Captain.”  
  
“Can’t help it when I’ve got such a helluva dame in the room with me.”  
  
She swats at his knee purposefully, if a little unsteady.  
  
“Peg, Bucky’s alive.”  
  
She turns at that, half her face in shadow, and stares for a beat, two: “Well, you didn’t ease into that, did you?”  
  
“You’re not surprised?”  
  
“Lord, not surprised? Ste-eve—” a quiet inhale, a louder exhale. “Sometimes I wonder if this is all a dream.”

He does too, and it’s the possibility that makes the reality more sickening. He used to dream himself back in the 40s, but even that happens with less frequency now.  
  
“How?”  
  
He tries to start, and then stops, and then starts again: “Zola— what he did to him, he survived the fall. They made him do terrible things, Peg.”  
  
She looks at him keenly from behind her glasses, waiting. But he can’t find the words, and there are some things he won’t say.

“How long?”

“I don’t know, off and on for years.” his hands scrabble for purchase on the arms of the chair. “They used to freeze him, in between uses.”

“Does the government know?”  
  
“No, I don’t know,” and this is what worries him most. “I think they’re too occupied with SHIELD right now. But sooner or later…”

“You need to have a plan, Steve. You need legal support,” she smiles at him a little sadly before adding: “You can’t parachute blindly into this one.”

“I know, I know,” and because he needs her to know he adds: “I loved him so much, Peg, but I love you too. I still wish I had married you.”  
  
He can’t help that his voice has gone wobbly at the end. He’s never said so much out loud, and one moment he’s digging the heels of his hands into his stinging eyes, and the next Peggy is tugging him gently forward until his face is buried in the crook of his neck, and she says: “Don’t you think I knew that? You daft bugger.”  
  
She lets him kiss her, soft and chaste.

“I thought we might have, I don’t even know now, shared you? ‘Business trips’ to his on the weekend, and the work-week at home— but I knew, my darling. How could I not?”  
  
Talking to her had always been cathartic, as comforting in the chaos of 2015 as it was in the years of the War. It’s still a marvel that someone as bright, as strong and beautiful as her had ever loved him; that someone as resilient as Bucky did too. Of all the things in his life, these were the memories that were the most precious.  
  
The record comes to a halt, and Steve takes his time putting the needle back to the beginning, his eyes still a little watery, but his heart a little lighter.

He stretches out a hand out in question when [ the music ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHAsFVjrDyg) starts once more: “May I?” he asks.

“Only if you think you carry around an old woman like me.” she says.

_Pick guitar, fill fruit jar and be gay-o. Son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bay-o._

“Always,” he says,  and she’s light in his arms when he picks her up carefully and swings her around. He has no sense of rhythm, only moves vaguely in tune with the music, but she laughs against his collarbone all the same

—

It’s late when he gets back to Brooklyn, the wind whipping at his shirt as the skyline of Manhattan glitters across the river, brighter than the stars of the night sky. The June air had always whispered of the promise of summer, and for the first time in years he feels the thrill of it.

He finds Bucky in the kitchen, a bowl of peaches at his left. Steve watches as he slices them cleanly, stopping to pull the pitt free with deft fingers.

“Good day?” he only turns slightly, slicing through the skin of a new peach and twisting until it’s split clean in half, the yellow flesh dripping juice down into the crook of either elbow.

He offers one half to Steve, who takes it, and bites into it before humming appreciatively.

“Good day.”

“Must be something in the water. The Mets won today too,” he tries to hide his smile behind a peach, but Steve doesn’t miss it.

“Yeah, something in the water,” and when he kisses Bucky it’s sweet and tart, and he’s left uncomfortably sticky.

“I didn’t _tell_ you to do that,” he says, when Steve complains.

That night Steve’s woken by screaming. It happens suddenly that he thinks at first that it was a fragment of his dream. Then it happens again, startling and clear. His only thought is that someone had come for Bucky, HYDRA or the government. It scarcely mattered _who_ as he propels into action unthinkingly, grabbing the shield from against the wall and skidding down the hallway so quickly that he nearly loses balance.

There’s nobody. Just Bucky with the sheets twisted around his legs and his hair damp with sweat. Steve does a round, two rounds of the entire apartment to ensure that he’s right, before he tries to wake Bucky. And even then he can’t calm the stuttering heartbeat that echoes through his ears, or the cold sweat that has broken out across his back.

“Hey Buck— Bucky,” he nudges his shoulder. “ _Buck!”_

He’s comes up swinging so suddenly that Steve isn’t braced for it. He tries to get his feet under him, tries to use the bulk of his weight to steady himself, but in the end finds himself thrown clear of the couch across the room, his right arm awkwardly pinned beneath him and his shield clattering across the floorboards.

He can hear Bucky’s ragged breathing, the unnatural purposeful way he steps towards him. The muscles of his legs are tensed, and Steve realises that he’s standing as if going into battle; gearing up to fight.

And Steve, who has never been scared of Bucky Barnes in his life, is unsettled now.

“ _Bucky_.”

He’s just managed to stand upright when he sees the fight go out of Bucky, the hard line of his shoulders slackening and his fists uncurling. Bucky’s still breathing ragged, as Steve mentally calculates any injuries, but the worst of it seems to be the dust he’d collected from the stint on the floor.

“I’m sorry— I shouldn’t have done that,” he says, slowly. “I’m—Are you okay?”

“I—,” he watches the flex-unflex-flex of Bucky’s jaw; the creasing of his forehead. “Steve.”

Bucky doesn’t sleep the whole night. Instead he sits and cleans his rifles, cleans the pistols. He unearths some from beneath the floorboards, and Steve listens from his bedroom to the rhythmic clicking as parts are assembled and reassembled.  
  
Bucky’s tense the entire day that follows, as Steve goes for his run, as he puts on the percolator and takes his shower. He’s gone when the coffee's done, and doesn’t return for two days.

When he does, he looks worse for wear. He stands in the doorway with a dark shadow of a beard and half-hidden behind the sweep of his hair, and says simply: “I’m sorry.”

It happens with regularity after that, on some nights he screams himself hoarse, and on others he crawls into Steve’s bed and clings to him with such force that it’d leave bruises if it weren’t for the serum. The sheets are often sweated through by morning, and Steve learns to wake him by calling his name, instead of touching him, when it gets particularly bad.

—

On Friday night he tumbles into bed with Bucky, laughing and kissing sweetly, if a little sloppily. Steve doesn’t set his alarm. He doesn’t wake at five-thirty. He doesn’t go jogging at six. Instead, at half-past nine he’s woken by knocking at the front door with Bucky’s arm thrown over his back, and a crick in his neck— Bucky had stolen his pillow again.

 The knock gets more persistent, and Steve is forced to stumble to the front door, dragging on a pair of boxers and a rumpled t-shirt over his head along the way.

Sam is standing there when Steve remembers how to use his hands and succeeds in opening the door.

“So,” he cocks an eyebrow at Steve’s bare legs. “Did you forget I was coming round?”

Steve fixes on a point somewhere above Sam’s left ear before answering: “Of course not. Come in,” and ushering Sam inside.

He sets about to clattering about the cupboards, gathering frying pans and measuring cups as Sam hangs his garment-bag on the hat-stand.

“I figure if we get out of here at around four we’ll be good,” Sam snags a banana from the fruit bowl before leaning back against the counter to peel it. “You good with the subway?”

“Oh, I’m not sure that sounds very safe,” Steve puts the percolator on. “Back in my day we just had to run the risk of being run over by the trollies.”

“That’s an awful joke. I hope you know that it’s an awful joke.”

Steve can’t even muster the energy to pretend that he’s hurt, just passes over the mixing bowl when Sam reaches out a hand for it.

“Pancakes?”

“Pancakes,” Steve agrees.

He lets Sam take control of the cooking, only helps to scrape flour into a measuring cup, and passes over the lemons for zesting when Sam directs him to.

The batter is in the pan by the time Bucky shows his face, sleep-rumpled and a little surly. He’s put on pants, but Steve catches Sam doing a double take, looking suspiciously from the couch, unslept on, and towards bedroom, from where Bucky has just emerged, and then back to Steve with a suggestive eyebrow, and a half-knowing, half-mocking smirk.

Steve is suddenly hyper-interested in the bubbles forming on the cooking pancakes and pretends not to notice. If a blush has crept up his neck, the heat of the stove can account for it.

“Looks like your friendly neighbourhood assassin’s awake,” Sam says, which only makes Bucky look doubly surly.

The kitchen smells of lemons and sugar once they’re done. Slightly muggy in a way that promises warm food. Steve has already downed four cups of coffee. Bucky still glours from the corner, but only slightly. Sam looks at the stack of pancakes like a lord overlooking his kingdom.

“When you see my mother,” he tells Steve seriously. “I expect you to tell her I fed you.”

“Deal.”

At the same time Bucky suspiciously chews at a corner of pancake, before upending what looks like a good half of the bottle of maple syrup onto his plate.

Steve gives him a questioning look.

“What? It’s not like I do this every time,” he shrugs with his right shoulder. “Only when the pancakes are particularly _dry.”_

Steve kicks him under the table.

“So that’s how it’s going to be, man?” Sam asks. Bucky ignores him.

At 1:07pm, like clockwork, Bucky puts on the Athletics vs Astros game, and Sam tells Steve about his rec baseball league team, The Chesapeake Beanballs.

“Our pitcher doesn’t pitch so much as he spikes the ball in the direction of home-plate,” he stretches out his arm and flails it in imitation. “But last game I scored the game-winning run because the ball got stuck in the Catcher’s mask and I got to walk home from third.”

The Astros win, by a lot. Steve cringes in sympathy before they head out, Sam freshly changed into jeans and a shirt that he rolls up to his elbows and Steve into slacks, which Bucky looks at appreciatively from behind. He’s even brushed his hair.

“I’ll be back around eleven,” he tells him, as Sam hustles him out the door.

He’s met Sam’s family before, in brief intervals when they stop at his house. His youngest sister, freshly graduated from college, is the wild-card of the family and reminds him of Charlie Barnes. And it stung sometimes, but it was also a testament to the endurance of a sort of endless youth. The Wilsons at large were nothing like the Barnes’ on the surface: Sam’s mother didn’t work in a factory, but had participated in the Civil Rights movement before becoming a social worker. His father was a Minister.

But there was an ease about them that spoke of a happy family life. Sam picking up his sisters in turn and swinging them around before they settle down into deck chairs. His mother tweaks him on the ear when he wishes her happy birthday, and the children of a distant cousin line up to gawp at Steve in awe before resuming their rowdy game of tag. It was the familiarity and warmth that had sparked jealousy in Steve as a child, sitting in the corner at Barnes family events, but which now allowed him to relax, to ease back in his chair with a beer in one hand and Sam’s sister Jacqueline on his right.

When Mrs. Wilson sits down to join them, Steve is sure to tell her that Sam was an excellent pancake-cook.

Later, when he gets home, it’s with a full stomach and a light mood. The feeling is only bolstered when he spots Bucky stretched over the length of the couch with his face half-hidden in the crook of the metal arm, and smiling in Steve’s direction sleepily.

“Good time?” he asks.

“Mmm,” Steve says appreciatively, bending down to bury his face in Bucky’s soft hair, breathing in the smell of him. When he kisses him, it’s soft and unhurried, a movement as easy as breathing. The stubble along Bucky’s jaw prickles the palm of his hand.

“When I dream,” Bucky says, when he pulls away for air, his eyes searching Steve’s face. “It’s about the War. Being stuck in that foxhole for days before HYDRA captured us.”

And Steve listens, carefully, can feel the steadiness of Bucky’s heartbeat beneath his palm. And then he hooks an arm under his knees to lift him. It’s a marvel, the warm surety of life in his hands, and it’s a marvel when he sets Bucky on the edge of the bed, that he could still do this after so many years. Could kiss him soundly, and feel safe.

He takes his time pushing his hand down past the band of Bucky’s boxers. He’s slower still getting him off with lazy strokes, feels the quickening of Bucky’s breath against his mouth, and then— the moment of quiet release.

—

It’s Sam who suggests a ball game a week and a half-later. It makes Steve hesitate: the apartment is one thing, small outings another, and a packed stadium another yet. But Bucky seems to like the idea, and that alone assures that Steve doesn’t decline the invitation.

He’s so high-strung about it that he nearly forgets to ask who’s playing who, but being a baseball fan is apparently muscle memory because he can’t manage to forget the cringe that comes with hearing the name of the Yankees.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sam holds up a hand to stop him. “Insulting a man is one thing, insulting his team is another.”

“Hey, _I_ didn’t tell you to support the second worst team in Major League Baseball.”

“Does TMZ know what an asshole Captain America actually is? I could just give them a call—”

They tussle mostly so Sam doesn’t think Steve’s letting him off easy.

He never went to Yankee Stadium as a kid, Steve hasn’t even stepped foot in the Bronx, and he doesn’t ask if Bucky has since then. It gives him a perverse sense of satisfaction that they’d somehow managed to outlive the original Yankee Stadium building.

They have to take the D-Train there. Steve with his baseball cap (red, unadorned) low over his eyes to try and escape notice, while Bucky stands around with his left arm in a compression sleeve, his left fist shoved into his pocket and somehow managing to blend in more than Steve ever had.

A stream of passengers comes in at 7th, jostling them and forcing Steve to stand with Bucky’s collarbone pressed against his shoulder. There’s a bag digging into Steve’s back, and a someone else breathing onto his arm, and hell, he should have taken the motorcycle, no matter what Sam said about parking because he’s suddenly hyperconscious of Bucky. Listening for the sound of inhale, exhale, trying to ascertain whether he should suggest that they get off at the next stop and walk the rest of the way—

Some of the turmoil must show on his face, because Bucky’s fingers skirt under the hem of his jacket, secret and comforting and a little ticklish. He leans in closer than necessary to whisper: “I’m fine, Steve. Swear,” along the shell of his ear. Some of his apprehensions dissipate with the words.

Sam’s waiting at 161 St. His thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jacket, and sunglasses shoved on his face. He doesn’t wave when he spots them, only cocks an eyebrow and gestures they follow with his chin.

“Didn’t get lost on the subway?”

“No, just saw a lot of bird crap,” Steve responds.

The new Yankee Stadium is, like everything in the twenty-first century, brighter and plasticky than he remembers. The blue seats are plastic, and even the field looks greener and smoother in a way that has him hankering after Ebbets Field with it’s wooden benches and turn-down seats, always at risk of splintering.

He catches Bucky scowling slightly and twisting around to examine his seat before he sits, and thinks he might be remembering too.

The Yankees are familiar, in their white and navy blue stripes. The Toronto Blue Jays are not.

At the bottom of the first, Bucky, who’s been sitting with his eyes narrowed and shoulders stiff, mutters something about needing the washroom, and slips out of his seat.

Steve trusts that he wouldn’t leave without good reason, wouldn’t leave without telling him. So he goes back to the game, and tries to avoid the niggling worry.

“Has the game changed a lot?” Sam asks, glancing over at Steve only momentarily before fixing his eyes on the field once more. He cheers loudly, pumping a fist into the air as the batter hits one into the corner of right-field and hustles it to second. A double.

This is familiar at least. The basic shapes are all the same, the dug-outs and hats and smells are mostly familiar. The helmets are not, and the sounds have shifted. Everytime the ball pings off the catcher's mask, he has to resist the urge to flinch.

“Back in my day, baseball was an American game,” he says, finally, hiding his wry smile in the palm of his hand.

“Yeah? Are the Canadians offending your good old 1930s sensibilities?”

Bucky chooses that moment to reappear, balancing drinks in the crook of his arm and clutching a large pack of peanuts in his left fist.

“They still have peanuts,” he says, dolling out the loot between the three of them. He doesn’t smile, but some of the tension seems to have ebbed away from the corners of his eyes. “Can you believe that, Rogers?”

Bucky pointedly ignores Sam’s thank you.

It’s not until they’re all settled back in their seats that Steve leans over to Sam and says “You know, I kind of like it.”

“Hm?”

“The Canadians— I kind of like it.”

Sam barks out a loud laugh, but Steve isn’t joking. Because some things are long lasting, and a Dodgers fan is still a Dodgers fan through and through, even if they’d been gone for the last sixty goddamn years. He wouldn’t root for the Yankees if hell itself froze over.

Bucky must be feeling the same, even if he says nothing, because he leaps up at the same moment as Steve top of the third when the Jays right-fielder belts a home run over the back wall.

“That’s how you do it!” Steve shouts.

Sam only groans.

There’s a pop-up from the Yankee second-baseman that ends bottom of the fifth, and the Jays are leading the Yankees 4-0. Someone behind them grumbles something that sounds suspiciously like “you piece of Canadian shit,” when Steve cheers, but it only helps to heighten his mood— the salty taste on his tongue, and Bucky’s warm knee pressing back against his own, and Sam at his right, furiously slurping the melting ice-cubes at the bottom of the root beer he’d anxiously downed in five minutes.

During the Seventh Inning Stretch, as the maintenance crews rush out to clean the field, and ‘America the Beautiful’ is played over the speakers, a few Canadian tourists stop at the end of the row to shoot them thumbs up.

“Nice jerseys!” Steve yells, pointing at their blue shirts, just for the hell of it.

The Jays are still leading top of the ninth 6-1, and he’s almost quailed into silence by Sam’s face, eyebrows bunched, mouth pursed and almost _daring_ him to speak.

“Sorry, Sam,” he says, not at all apologetically, before joining in on the “Lets Go Blue Jays” chant.

When the Yankees lose, he’s one of the few cheering, but not so loud that he doesn’t hear Bucky remark wrly to Sam: “Didn’t your ma ever tell you that if you keep on making that face, it’ll stay that way?”

It’s the first time Bucky has addressed Sam properly all day, and the sight of Sam’s momentarily stunned expression is enough to make Steve laugh.

“You know what, you’re an asshole. The both of you are assholes.” He brandishes his plastic drink cup menacingly. “You deserve each other.”

Bucky’s eyes crinkle, and Steve is flooded by sudden thankfulness. He slings an arm around Bucky’s shoulders in time to hear him retort: “You’re going to have to sell me back to HYDRA, because there’s no way I’d ever willingly cheer for the Yankees.”

Steve can’t begrudge Sam for swearing, not so subtly, under his breath.

—

Bucky takes to wearing a Blue Jays hat in the week that follows, though he won’t fess up to where he got it from. When Steve says as much to Sam, Sam is unusually evasive.

“So that’s how it is?”

“That’s how it is,” Sam confirms.

But he’s around during the week to put music on Steve’s phone for him, showing how to adjust the settings and how to sort through his library: Album, Artist, Genre. It’s clean and efficient in that same way as much of the twenty-first century.

“I put some things on there that you might like,” Sam tells him, clicking through the artists and scrolling.

Bucky, who has ventured near enough to see what’s happening, scoffs: “Those aren’t gloomy enough for Steve. He only likes music that makes him cry.”

Not to be outdid, Steve adds: “Bucky’s only saying that because his favourite group’s the Andrews Sisters, otherwise known as  the Spice Girls of the 1940s”

“Who’re the Spice Girls?” Bucky frowns.

Sam laughs.

Bucky remembers things with a greater, if still irregular, frequency. A beam of sunlight which spreads from a gap in the blackout curtains brings to mind the bedroom he had shared with his brothers. The smell of whiskey reminds him of his father, and nights spent drinking on the fire-escape after dinner. Steve nicks himself shaving, and Bucky says offhandedly: “Did you get in another fight?”

He remembers the War, too. Azzano and the way London had been blanketed with snow in the winter of ‘43-’44. Sometimes he asks Steve after them, trying to ascertain the verity of their shape. 

Sometimes he remembers fragmented memories of his time after the War, and of these he never speaks to Steve. And Steve never asks.

Instead on the heels of one of these bad spells, Steve tucks his phone into his pocket, and fills a plastic bag with bottles of cold beer. He convinces Bucky to follow him, tucked behind Steve on the bike as they weave through traffic to Bay Ridge. He only slows once they reach Fourth Avenue, pulling the bike into a spot down a residential street.

“You going to tell me what we’re doing here?” Bucky asks, looking at the facades of the buildings with a furrowed brow.

“Not yet,” Steve says, coming to a halt at the corner of the street. There’s a medical centre here now, in the building that had been the Knights of Columbus. They had spent innumerous hours here. Bucky dancing, Steve sitting. Aside from the hours spent in the safety of their apartment, Bucky had never seemed as carefree as he was in those interludes.

He spends ten minutes scoping out the parameters as covertly as possible before Bucky sighs: “Should I?” he gestures towards the building.

“Only if you’re sure.”

Ten minutes later Bucky is letting him in through the front door.

The outside had remained much as Steve remembered it in ‘38, but the inside had been divided into offices. They poke through the rooms: conference, examination. When they reach the MRI, Steve feels Bucky go rigid next to him, and it’s a further few minutes after Steve shoulders him from the room before his breathing levels.

They finally settle down in the waiting room which retains the original wood finishes, but to which Steve can’t place a use in his memory.

It’s not until Steve has pulled the caps from the beer and positioned his phone on the table that Bucky barks out an incredulous laugh: “Did you bring me here to _dance_ , Rogers?”

Steve responds with [ the Andrews Sisters ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe2UXccid40).

And dancing, like assembling a rifle or throwing a punch, seems to come down to muscle memory. One moment Steve is tugging Bucky up, and the next moment Bucky’s hiding a smile against his shoulder muttering: “Christ. Steve, it’s called a _triple step_ , not a running step.”

He’s still awful at dancing, which Bucky had always insisted was because of his stubbornness to be proven wrong. He doesn’t have a sense of tempo, can’t count out the _rock-step, triple-step, step-step_ with his feet. The only thing he’d ever managed to do passably was face-to-face Charleston, but the music is wrong for that, and it doesn’t matter so much in the end because Bucky is singing under his breath,  and smiles faintly as he nudges Steve into a swing-out.  
  
When he finally relinquishes his grasp on Steve’s back, and tumbles down on the bench across from him, he’s quiet for a few moments.   [ Music ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PPJZTRqQ1Xw) fills the spaces of silence.

“What happened to my family?”

Steve is taken off guard, and has to swallow the sudden lump in his throat before he can speak. Steve has the dates memorised down to a science: Winifred Barnes, d. 1973, stroke; George Barnes, d. 1956, cardiac arrest; Rebecca Barnes, d. 1961, cancer; Charles Barnes, d. 1997, kidney disease. There were nieces and nephews, and their children after them. Roy’s son James had died in Vietnam.

“Roy’s still alive.” he tells him.

Bucky stares at him blankly. He’s quiet the whole way back, and doesn’t come to bed with Steve. He’s gone in the morning.

And Steve doesn’t panic. He worries, likely always will, but the sharp stab of fear doesn’t come. Instead, he visits Peggy. He goes to lunch with Sam. He discovers new music: Adele and Joni Mitchell, which he purchases on records from a thrift store.

He accidentally finds himself embroiled in an ongoing rent-strike: “Captain America says ‘don’t pay your rent’!— more at 5!”

He starts watching Star Trek.

And then Bucky is back, returning as quietly as he left. There are dark circles under his eyes, but his hands are steady and calm.

“You should have told me,” he says.

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you?”

And there are a thousand reasons why, none which were justified: he had visited Roy once himself, and had been asked to leave by the nurses. Roy was in a bad way, and it would hurt Bucky. Bucky was in a bad way, and it would hurt Roy. He had waited too long to say so, and then it had become uncomfortable. Some things were better left unsaid.

“I’m sorry.”

“You should have told me, Steve.” Bucky scrubs a hand over his tired face. “It’s not up to you or your moralism, okay? He’s my brother. You don’t get to decide what’s best for me.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” and he is. “I just— I wish you talked to me, told me what you need. Not just now, but before the War, too.”

Bucky looks up at that, and then he breathes once, twice, and says: “Okay.”

And he does. He says: “I just need some time, okay?” and is gone for a weekend. He says: “Stop,” in bed, when Steve encircles him too tightly with his arms. He says: “Sam Wilson is a real asshole sometimes,” in front of Sam. He says: “Steve, if you weren’t here. I don’t know that I could do this.”

And this is the precarious existence they’d carved out. Late nights disturbed by nightmares, drinking glasses of water. Bucky discovering [ Bobby Darin ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8OlDPqYBLw) and bobbing to the beat when he thinks Steve isn’t looking. Having sex, and then lying on cooling sheets too lazy to stand. Anniversaries of the bad. Anniversaries of the good.

“What did you do? You’re trending on twitter.”

“I don’t have twitter,” Steve pauses in the act of chopping a bell-pepper.

“#CaptainCommunist: Steve Rogers, otherwise known as Captain America, spurns controversy with radical statement in support of Brooklynite rent-strikers.”

Steve groans, Bucky laughs.

On July 4th, Bucky wakes him with coffee and gifts.

“I thought you hated Vera Lynn?” Steve asks, a smile dancing at the corners of his mouth as he unwraps first her autobiography: ‘Some Sunny Day’, and then several records: ‘Vera Lynn: the Great Years’, ‘Sincerely Yours: Vera Lynn’, ‘Vera Lynn Remembers: The World At War’

“Yeah, well. Some idiot I know’s been carrying a torch for her since ‘38 and he didn’t have any of her albums.”

When Bucky kisses him, it’s with promise.

—

 

Sam comes over for dinner. Natasha and Clint come for dinner. And somewhere along the way the number of good days had begun to outnumber the bad.

“Should I just—?” Clint brandishes a cellophane wrapped-houseplant at Bucky, before setting it down on one of the bookshelfs.

“He thought he should bring a housewarming gift,” Natasha whispers to Steve with fondness.

Later, after the cake has been eaten and the wine has been drunk, Sam tells Steve: “I know a good lawyer from the VA. If you should need one.”

And it’s Bucky who says: “Thanks.”

The picture frames get put up. Bucky drills holes along the clean-line projected by the electric leveller.  Steve puts the photo of Bucky as Carmen Miranda on their book-case. They paint the walls, and get an area-rug. Bucky watches Baseball, and keeps his carefully noted scorecards and Mets ticket-stubs— _cheaper than the Yankees, Steve_ — on their side-table.

Steve visits Peggy, and then goes for lunch with Sam.

They visit Coney Island and Steve gets a sunburn:

“There are too many tourists now.”

Steve agrees.

And Bucky remembers, and Steve remembers too. They sit on the boardwalk, eating soy-dogs, because it was 2015 and the time was ripe for something new. And Steve remembers why he had never let Bucky put the dressings on in the ‘30s: too much mustard.

He makes a face, and Bucky kisses it away, regardless of the crowds, tasting disgustingly of mustard, and pleasantly like himself.

The days turn to weeks, which turn to months, which speak of the promise of years.

Days spent at home in easy silence on the lumpy couch, in the room protected by black-out curtains.

And one day Bucky gives a jolt, and then turns to Steve and says:

“How could you?”

And Steve says: “How could I what?”

And he sings: [_“Some people say I dress too gay,_ _  
_ _But everyday, I feel so gay;_ _  
_ _And when I’m gay, I dress that way,_ _  
_ _Is something wrong with that?_ _  
_ _No!”_](https://youtu.be/w7gMF4KAve0?t=1m25s)

Steve can’t control the sudden laughter that bubbles out of his chest.

“It’s not funny! How could you let me go on stage and sing that?” Bucky asks, stricken, pushing weakly as Steve’s shoulder before he ends up sprawled over his knees. “With _fruit_ on my head!”

But then he’s laughing too.

And the barbarity of the twentieth century is still difficult to stomach, let alone comprehend. There are still weeks when the bad days outnumber the good. He still has frequent nightmares. He still can’t stomach the enormity of his own legacy. Steve would still give anything to go back to the time before the Ice, the time before Cryofreeze, to the time when Peggy was young and whole. But for a moment, unable to catch his breath, with his sides aching, and with Bucky’s warm weight across him, he feels content.

And somewhere in the distance, Vera Lynn [ sings on ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcunREYzNY).

_But I know we'll meet again, some sunny day._

[](https://www.hostingpics.net/viewer.php?id=844506laughtercolvictoria.png)

—

_"Ultimately the thing that helped me find some healing [was when] I learned that life was not about turning the page, or getting to the other side of something. It’s about holding what is broken about the world and holding what is joyful about the world, and being able to take a step forward with both."_

\- R.A. Dickey, Pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, on surviving childhood abuse

—

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading this <3
> 
> I swore I'd never write a recovery fic, because there are already so many incredible works out there, but hey-- here we are. 
> 
> I used a number of sources while writing this:  
> 'Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming' by Jonathan Shay was my main source for research into PSTD and trauma, and the way it affects veterans attempting to reintegrate civilian society and life. 'Achilles in Vietnam', another text by Jonathan Shay was also useful.
> 
> 'Testament of Youth' by Vera Brittain was the source of the quotes in the scene involving Steve's books. 
> 
> 'Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II' by Alan Berube was endlessly useful in providing both oral histories and research into the lives of queer people during the War. Soldier drag shows were a common facet of military life, and occurred on nearly every military base. Carmen Miranda was the most popular imitation act, so much so that soldiers actually grew sick of it by the end of the war. However, soldier drag shows weren't limited to imitation acts, but there were entire drag musicals and plays written during the war, and even when women W.A.A.C.s were available to play the female roles, the soldiers actually preferred the all-male casts. The most famous is 'This is the Army' which was later turned into a non-drag musical film. You can hear Steve's beloved Vera Lynn perform a medly of the songs (without changing the pronouns!) [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALASmw94OUE). 
> 
> I used 'When the Old Left was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941' for information on youth radicalism in 1930s Brooklyn.
> 
> Lastly, but not least, the R.A. Dickey quote is taken from [this article](http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/books/the-literary-life-of-r-a-dickey). Cw: the article discusses childhood sexual abuse.
> 
> If you enjoyed the fic, and would consider reblogging it on Tumblr, you can find the RBB masterpost [here](http://themastersbeard.tumblr.com/post/161668172447/some-sunny-day-at-six-he-goes-jogging-at) and the art masterpost [here.](http://ilyone.tumblr.com/post/161745636918/my-second-collaboration-for-the) ❤


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